It seems as if Peter Dutton, Christian Porter, Scott Morrison and Australia's law enforcement and intelligence agencies -- and quite a few News Corp journalists -- want to make life much easier for hackers, foreign governments, terrorists and organised criminals and life harder for the rest of us.

It appears they want to do that by giving agencies the power to force tech companies to plant bureaucrat-designed malware onto computers and phones to intercept information before it is encrypted. This will send a raft of purpose-built viruses into the wild to be collected and sold by hackers as guaranteed, government-approved methods of defeating the encryption that we rely on for privacy, for commerce, for cybersecurity. And all for free.